My All American Finn Wittrock, Aaron Eckhart, Sarah Bolger. Directed by Angelo Pizzo. Rated PG. Opens Friday.

My All American announces its awkward hokiness from its very first scene, in which a student journalist lobs clumsily worded questions at legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal, played by Aaron Eckhart in horrendous-looking old-age makeup. “Coach, could you tell me the plot of the movie we’re about to watch?,” she essentially asks him. Royal then dutifully flashes back to the 1960s, although he’s not actually involved in the early parts of the story, in which small-town Colorado boy Freddie Steinmark (Finn Wittrock) becomes a high-school football sensation. Freddie is a nice guy with a loving family and a supportive girlfriend (Sarah Bolger), and when Royal recruits him to play for the University of Texas, his girlfriend even tags along.

For more than an hour, My All American is an excruciatingly boring and poorly written story about a great guy whose life is great, with tone-deaf period detail (“Have you ever heard of a little place called Vietnam?”) and no narrative tension. Then, finally, Freddie gets cancer, and the movie piles on the manipulative emotion, building to a triumphant moment when Freddie, barely recovered from major surgery, returns to the sidelines to support his team.

There’s no reason to believe that the real Steinmark was anything other than a wonderful human being, and it’s nice that writer-director Angelo Pizzo (who wrote both Rudy and Hoosiers, so he knows his inspirational sports treacle) wanted to pay tribute to him. But My All American is a complete failure as drama, shot in a flat TV-movie style (with tedious football scenes). Pizzo reduces his actors to mouthpieces for greeting-card sentiment, and while Eckhart brings a bit of integrity to his role as the upstanding coach, Wittrock is little more than a pretty face. Even his suffering is beatific.

Instead of genuine inspiration, the movie provides only flimsy, superficial positivity. It ends with the elderly Royal still prattling on, and the audience is left just as restless and baffled as the inept reporter.